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I'm sort of hoping this ultimately ends with the final dissolution of the league, every player fleeing overseas, and Bettman revealing a clause in his contract stating that if the sport ceased to exist, he gets all the unpaid salaries, ownership of every arena, and custody of the mascot costumes in perpetuity.

At least then his motivations would make sense.

Also, each host city must pay him ten million dollars because it's all their fault.

In our group of 4 that go in on season tickets, I think we are down to two....with the two of us on the edge of the rail about to bail off of this sinking ship. We finally got our Winter Classic money back and we still have not gotten a penny on the season tickets. Now the Wings are trying to give away a bunch of stuff and events (Fox theater with Santa, etc.) but it's not enough to keep us. This is just like every other league....the owners need savings from themselves with their ridiculous long term contracts and how they can skirt the salary cap with them. Nick retried just in time and if they ever come back I might not go back.

sig Syren, bouncy by IceCat, bobble head by Tribephyl, and snoglobe by agman

Yeah I'm noticing a completely different dynamic during this lockout that wasn't present during the one in 2005 - there's a real sense of indifference and disgust with the whole process. In 2005, I had regular conversations with my hockey pool circle (about a hard core group of fans as you'll find anywhere) even after the season was cancelled, but this time I haven't discussed hockey with anyone for over a month now. In Toronto, the Jays have dominated the conversation even when the Argos were winning the Grey Cup and people barely remember there's a team called the Maple Leafs (as well they should, even when the NHL was open for biz, but I digress).

The NHL blew it as they really had a chance to develop a core of new fans with Los Angeles winning the Cup. Something's gotta give - Gary Bettman has to go and we may also see some franchises folding or moving.

The ongoing problem is one of Bettman's own making: overexpansion. The question is, how do you fix it?

Hockey has expanded into a bunch of places with no hockey roots, such as Carolina, Florida and Phoenix. Let's look at home attendance as a percentage of capacity. 21 teams averaged over 95% of capacity in 2011-12. The others?

These are also nine of the bottom 10 teams in per-game home attendance (the other being Winnipeg, which has a small arena for now).

I don't care what Bettman does; these franchises are likely going to lose money from now until doomsday. The presence of Colorado on this list is disappointing, since no one thinks of Denver as a poor hockey market. It certainly appears that New York City can't accomodate three teams, since two of them (the Islanders and the Devils) are on this list. And the rest of these teams are just misplaced, especially Dallas, Phoenix and (I'm sorry to say) Columbus.

Bettman needs to focus on getting hockey teams in hockey cities, instead of whatever con job he pulled to stick Phoenix with the Coyotes. Metro Toronto should have three teams, not Metro New York City.

Until Bettman is willing to embrace a sensible re-pairing of teams and markets, nothing will fix the NHL's long-term problems.

(P.S. I include the idiotic Donald Fehr among those long-term problems.)

"ten counties in New York State (coinciding with the five boroughs of New York City, the two counties of Long Island, and three counties in the lower Hudson Valley); 12 counties in Northern and Central New Jersey; and one county in northeastern Pennsylvania."

"Q: When David Stern finally gets his way and Gary Bruce Bettman kills the NHL, what happens to Lord Stanley's Cup a.k.a. the greatest trophy in pro sports? Will it be rented out for parties? I know that I'd pay top dollar to spend a night drinking booze from it. Or maybe the NFL can buy it and rename it the Lord Stanley's Lombardi Cup. There are implications beyond losing a league and the best live experience from any American pro sport. We should really be planning the fate of the Stanley Cup now before Bettman starts using it as his personal outhouse.— Brandon, Sacramento

SG: I like the idea of renting the Stanley Cup — if they charged $25,000 per night, with the caveat "The Stanley Cup cannot leave North America," how many nights could they sell off to wealthy people desperately trying to impress their friends? Maybe 200 or so? But I love the idea of another league buying the Cup. Why wouldn't the NBA (which currently has the worst trophy in professional sports) purchase it for $25 million as Stern's final dagger into the NHL's back nearly 20 years after planting his mole there? The NHL won't truly hit rock-bottom until it hawks the Cup — that would be the league's "Dirk Diggler jerking off in a church parking lot for 20 bucks" nadir.

(Shouldn't a few NHL diehards steal the Cup and threaten to melt it by January 15 unless hockey comes back? At the very least, couldn't we make this idea into a sports movie? Like a cross between Ocean's Eleven, Ransom and Celtic Pride? This feels like Kevin Smith's next straight-to-cable comeback movie. I'd call it either Stealing Lord Stanley or Five Minutes for Kidnapping.)"

The NHL doesn't own the Stanley Cup. It's actually controlled by a nonprofit trust governed under Canadian law. And I've been wondering if the trustees would award it to another North American team if the lockout causes the NHL season to be cancelled, consistent with the threat they made after the 2005 season was wiped out..

I've seen discussion of awarding to the winners of the world amateurs -- but that's just sportswriters passing time. Handing it to the Frozen Four team will probably come up eventually, but I expect the NCAA to preemptively block it because they can.

While I've been a fan of Olympic hockey, I've never gotten into pro hockey, dunno why, but this nonsense might be part of the reason I haven't invested my time and interest in it.

Time. Interest. Money. Yes, it's about the money that isn't there.

That's not to say I don't like hockey. When I was a teen, we had a pond in the woods next to my folks place where we'd play and wow, it's as much if not more fun than football in the snow and bona fide hard ball baseball on an empty lot in the summer.

From what I can tell, with what little I know, I think the NHL just scored a slapshot on itself.

yep. '94 mostly killed baseball for me but then when MLB wouldn't cough up 50K for September callups for the Expos in 2003 when they were in a tie for the lead in the Wild Card standings heading into September, that was the final straw

Now I'm looking at a similar situation with hockey. Two lock-outs in 7 years. While I don't think they'll cancel the season, I am going to be less interested this year than in previous years.

Given that I'm not an NFL guy or a baseball guy, there isn't a lot of choice for me out there. CFL is coming back to Ottawa but I'll take me a while to get interested in that again. However, in the past couple of years I've found that I'm spending a lot more time following the careers of Canadian golfers (such as Graham DeLaet, Brad Fritsch, David Hearn (and Weir, obviously)) and Canadian tennis players (Raonic, Wozniak, Nestor, Dubois, Marino and up and comers Peliwo, Bouchard, etc). Maybe it'll be that. But, only having a TV with rabbit ears means I can't get most sporting events on TV. Even the Brier isn't on free TV.

The problem is, this new agreement doesn't fix what's wrong with NHL hockey, because there are still 30 teams, with a number of the teams located in inhospitable places. Perhaps -- just perhaps -- this agreement will help the marginal teams like Tampa Bay and Nashville enough so that they can survive.

But this doesn't help Dallas and Phoenix, for example, one bit. Those teams just aren't going to survive in their current markets. And Don Fehr, no matter how much of an SOB he is, isn't the one responsible for those teams being in those places; Gary Bettman is.

The NHL was victimized by a number of con men acquiring franchises during the last 20 years. That would never have happened if Bettman hadn't been trying to keep the owners solvent with expansion money. In 2013, the NHL finally has a core of responsible, solvent owners. But it won't last unless the NHL can find a way to fix its product location.

I still remember the 1978-79 season, before the WHA merger brought in 3 more Canadian teams (Edmonton, Winnipeg and Quebec City), when a 17-team NHL had only 3 teams in Canada: Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Detroit and Buffalo counted as "proxy" Canadian teams because of their location on the border, but that still showed a disregard for the importance of the real audience that was amazing. Today, there are still only 7 NHL teams in Canada: the only location change is that the Quebec City team is gone and there are teams in Calgary and Ottawa. Even taking the two border teams into account, that's too low a percentage in the main market. Bettman's mistake was in trying to position NHL teams to increase the chances of getting a national TV contract. After all, the NFL doesn't have a team in the U.S.'s second-largest city, but that doesn't affect its TV ratings.

Anyway, now that Bettman has a solid TV partner in NBC (due to Comcast's takeover of NBC), he needs to focus on creating stable franchises in their home markets. -- even if those home markets are outside of the U.S.

Correct they fixed nothing, they stopped some stupid contracts so saving the owner from himself but it will create some new stupid contracts for more money over a shorter period of time that will fudge the salary cap. You can still hide a guy in the minors or overseas to get around the cap from my understanding.

They didn't deal with contraction or realignment a bit of having a floor that a teams got to spend but there is still major flaws in the system and business model that were ignored.

So I predict that in 8 years we have another lock out/strike espeically if Bettman is still around.

sig Syren, bouncy by IceCat, bobble head by Tribephyl, and snoglobe by agman

The problem for Bettman is that he has three groups of owners: those who were making money under the current deal (e.g., Boston, Toronto), those who were breaking even, and those who were losing money. Under the new deal, groups 1 and 2 are happy, but group 3 is still going to be losing money.

I don't know how to fix the problem if not through contraction or relocation, and I'm certain that neither Bettman nor Fehr do either.

Maybe Bettman thinks that he can accomplish either contraction or relocation in the next 8 years.

Only 7 teams in Canada? Wait, didn't the Jim Ballsilly of RIM move Phoenix to Hamilton or Waterloo??

Contraction is the solution. The problem with teams in, say, Phoenix is lack of market for the product. The problem with adding more teams in smaller Canadian cities is that even if there is a population who will watch the games, there is not more corporate dollars to fund the teams (through adverising, corporate seats, etc). Canada's economy just isn't big enough. Sadly I think the NHL relies on a lot of ticket sales coming from corporations, and Canada's economy just won't support that in more markets.

As expected, the top 7 have the 7 NHL teams. The next few on the list are not much smaller, but all would steal from existing team markets (Toronto, Buffalo, and most people in London cheer for the Red Wings I think).

If the number can be trusted - is Boston really smaller than Hamilton?? But this actually proves my point that even if the Boston population is similar in size to Hamilton, the economy is probably 20x the size.

Boston is more or less the same city size as Hamilton (575,000-600,000), but the metropolitan area is around 4 million or so. There's Lexington, Cambridge, Quincy, Framington, Peabody, Salem, etc. etc. etc. that are big places on their own within the Boston area, plus you could theoretically stretch the metropolitan area to include Providence, Worcester and Manchester, which stretches the population of the greater area to 7 or 8 million.

That's certainly far, far more than the Hamilton area which is considered to be part of the Maple Leafs' primo area.

Still, while Boston would have 20x Hamilton's economy, I think there's a greater percentage of people who would call themselves true-blood hockey fans and would be able to support a second team on the outskirts of the greater area, i.e. the Hamilton-Guelph-London triangle that includes Kitchener, Waterloo and Brantford (Gretzky's hometown).

Even if Hamilton-Guelph-London triangle that includes Kitchener, Waterloo and Brantford has more die-hard fans, that area would not have enough businesses to support the team compared to the number of businesses in the Greater Boston area (IMO).

I tend to doubt that there aren't enough businesses to support a team in the Hamilton-Guelph-London area. I remember the old days of the NBA, when you couldn't get businesses to sponsor teams for love nor money. Frankly, that was because no one cared about the NBA before the "great breakthrough": the Bird-Magic rivalry, followed by the rise of Jordan.

The real issue for the NBA, though, was that no one was buying tickets. It's hard to believe, but NBA teams didn't always play in front of Jack Nicholson, Spike Lee and their ilk. They used to think they were fortunate just to sell out. Well, that's not an issue that a Hamilton-Guelph-London team would have.

Add on the national sponsors who would want to show up on Hockey Night in Canada, and there wouldn't be any problems for a franchise there. Of course, the RIM people are no longer in a financial position to afford a franchise, but there are plenty of rich people in the area who would like their own franchise to show Larry Tanenbaum that it doesn't take sane people 40 years to build a winner.

Working and chasing clients in Canada, I see that the business world here is increasingly Canadian offices that are satellites of US-lead businesses. I work for a global conglomerate, and increasingly decisions are made in the US and for the US parts of the business. Take Hamilton, for example, where the largest employer was Stelco which is not owned by US Steel. My experience has been that US Steel-type companies will not invest in Canada the way they might in the US. There are not that many RIMs out there, and we have seen the couple that are (Nortel and RIM) lose all/a lot of their financial power.

I haven't studied this, but am just going by my experience from working here in Canada. Almost every day I see another business that used to be Canadian-led being run out of the US, and thus the focus is away from Canada.

I haven't heard or read full details on the shortened season, but one radio host said East would only play West for the Stanley Cup, and each team would play the others in their own division seven teams apiece.

My beaucoup-bucks hockey pool league ($100 per person, 21 years in the running) appears to be on life support as I sent out a call for participants yesterday morning. Of the nine replies so far, three are still interested but six aren't up to it (four of them have been involved since the first season in 1990).

Going to be very different without a pool to host for the first time in two decades.

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